Are meta tags dead?

Will Wilson just sent me a link to an interesting article which promoted me to ask this question:

Are meta tags dead?

According to Danny Sulliva it is:

... my advice about the meta keywords tag for ages has been simple. For those running large web sites or short on time, don't worry about it. The stress and time involved in trying to craft a tag was not worth it, in terms of the minor benefit it might bring. It is far more important for site owners to instead concentrate on creating good title tags for their pages, a key page element that has consistently shown it can help with ranking across all major crawlers.

Now this article is rather old but the question is still valid... your thoughts?

PS this is my three hundredth post